Category: Banana Republicanism

Monday Wake Up Call – May 1, 2023

The Daily Escape:

The Schooner Surprise, built in 1918, is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, Camden Harbor, ME – April 2023 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

A few words about Biden, McCarthy and the Debt Ceiling. We all know that the clock is ticking on a US default of our debt sometime in June. There are multiple opinions in DC about who has the leverage in the coming debate between the House GOP, Senate Dems and Biden.

The institutionalist view is that McCarthy and the House GOP have taken the Debt Ceiling hostage and they plan a hostage negotiation with Biden. Some think that McCarthy is doing it badly. Others take the darker view that the Republicans are actually trying to crash the economy so that America blames Biden and returns the GOP to power in 2024.

If you think, based on what we’ve seen so far, that the GOP doesn’t plan to negotiate, that like terrorists, they will kill as many hostages as possible until their terms are 100% met, what they’re doing makes sense.

The NYT reports that McCarthy has been open about the fact that this is not a real bill:

“This bill is to get us to the negotiations….It is not the final provisions, and there’s a number of members who will vote for it going forward…say there are some concerns they have with it. But they want to make sure the negotiation goes forward because we are sitting at $31 trillion of debt.”

For the umpteenth time, we’re watching a game of chicken about raising the debt limit. There are something like 45 days until the Debt Ceiling must be raised. You know the “or else” sentence that follows: Or else, the US will face potentially calamitous economic consequences.

McCarthy’s bill may get the Republicans a seat at the table in the negotiations over raising the debt limit, but Biden’s position remains: “Send a clean debt limit bill, or pound sand.”

Has McCarthy overplayed a bad hand? If he had failed to get anything passed he would have looked completely incompetent. Nevertheless, passing a bill filled with devastating cuts and manifestly unpopular positions that will be difficult to defend except to the Party faithful, it is arguably worse than getting nothing done at all.

If the Dems are smart they will take the GOP’s messaging bill and come up with a message that has broad appeal that can be used to hurt the GOP in swing districts for the next two years. McCarthy’s bill shows that Republicans’ ultimate goal is to gut health care, food stamps and education, and even veterans benefits. The Vote Vets organization is out with a message:

“And now, it is the fringe MAGA party that voted for a budget that would gut health care and support for our Veterans. 217 of them voted for it, and just 4 against. They talk tough when it comes to Military action, but go AWOL when it’s time to take care of those who served.”

This bill isn’t intended to pass. Republicans had an opportunity to aim a productive salvo at swing voters to convince them that GOP majorities can deliver normalcy, and give them some sign that the Party was tacking away from the extremist positions that alienated voters in the last midterm elections.

Instead, their message is that the Party is about owning the libs and slashing aid for veterans and the poor. The GOP can’t even fake being a Party interested in governing anymore. That’s bad news for McCarthy, the man chained to the GOP canoe that’s heading over the falls. As Succession’s the late Logan Roy would say “You are not serious people.”

Instead the GOP’s message to the world is that America’s commitment to paying its debts is contingent on an underlying political negotiation about the size of the budget deficit.

  • Republicans believe they can win the political standoff by making Biden and Democrats look petty by refusing a basic negotiation.
  • Democrats also seem to be betting that Senate Republicans will step in as more mature political actors and defuse this situation.

The NYT quotes Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-NY) and majority leader:

“Discussion of spending cuts belongs in talks about the budget, not for bargaining chips on the debt ceiling….The speaker should drop the brinkmanship, drop the hostage taking, come to the table with Democrats to pass a clean bill to avoid default.”

Time to wake up America! This kabuki play will run through at least mid-June. It’s a DC big boy fight. And we the little people, will have no say until November 2024 when we can escort the GOP flame throwers out of the House. To help you wake up, watch Crowded House perform “Don’t Dream It’s Over” from their first (of three) farewell tours, played at the Sydney Opera House in November 1996:

One of the greatest songs of the 80s and it still hits hard today.

Sample Lyrics:

There is freedom within, there is freedom without
Try to catch a deluge in a paper cup
There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 30, 2023

This month, Texas Senate Republicans passed three bills allowing religion into public schools. From Vox:

“The first, SB 1515, would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in classrooms. The other bill, SB 1396, would permit public schools to set aside time for students and staff members to pray or read the Bible and other religious texts. The third, SB 1556, would give employees the right to pray or “engage in religious speech” while on the job.”

Some of this sounds unconstitutional. You can be certain that plenty of Texans will be happy to comply as maliciously as possible next fall.

The three bills now go to the Texas House for approval. They follow Texas’s SB 797, which took effect in 2021 and requires schools to display “In God We Trust” signs.

When the Texas Right say they want to bring religion back into public schools, they mean they want to make public schools more Christian. This flies in the face of America becoming noticeably less religious over the past 20 years:  Weekly service attendance and religious self-identification are both down 20% overall, which translates to about 50 million fewer Americans than two decades ago.

This is ironic: If religious identification is to increase, it will have to come from “importing” traditional believers from the global south. But few of them are white. So that’s a problem for Trumpism and the reactionary Right. On to cartoons.

State-sponsored religion is hard to swallow:

Biden announces he’s running:

How do young voters fit in the race between these geriatrics?

A certain debate this time:

House Republicans pass a debt ceiling bill:

McCarthy wonders why Biden won’t talk:

Daylight come and he got to go home:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 23, 2023

Another busy week filled with news we didn’t want to hear. Fox’s huge $787.5 million payout in the Dominion lawsuit seems appropriate, but Lever News reports that Fox can take a tax deduction from the settlement. Ironically the financial consequences of lying are just a cost of doing business for Murdoch and Co.

Fox Corporation reported $1.2 billion in net income in 2022, so the $787 million Dominion settlement is equivalent to about two-thirds of the company’s profits last year. The Lever quotes Daniel Shaviro a tax professor at NYU:

“If your business model is to tell lies so that you’ll get viewers and have lots of advertising revenues, then, odious though this business model may be, the tax system’s job is to tax you on the profits that you actually make from it…”

Fox reported paying an effective income tax rate of 27% in 2022 (the  combination of federal and New York taxes). If Fox can write off the full settlement payment to Dominion, it could amount to an estimated $213 million in tax savings. On to cartoons.

Fox didn’t even have to do this:

Losing the lawsuit didn’t cost Fox any viewers:

Justice Sam Alito was in an especially grumpy mood after the other Justices on the Supreme Court ruled that access to Mifepristone will remain unchanged while the case continues to wind through the courts. Alito and Thomas dissented even though the underlying suit is frivolous:

Note that Thomas is drinking a coke.

That the SpaceX rocket crashed and burned was totally on brand for Elon:

Kevin McCarthy explains his position:

Dalai Lama must retire:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – April 22, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Rainbow, Blue Ridge Parkway, VA – April 2023 photo by Tim Lewis

American carnage is real, my friend. Just not in the way that Trump stated in his inaugural rant. The American carnage Wrongo speaks of is the gun attacks made on others by angry or fearful lone American gunmen. From Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

“Ringing the wrong doorbell, making a wrong turn, getting in the wrong car, and an errant basketball. A wounded teenager, a dead young woman, cheerleaders in critical condition, and a 6-year-old girl and her father shot.”

The Indiana man who shot a 16-year-old boy for knocking on his door is described by his grandson as a conspiracy theorist and avid consumer of right-wing media: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I feel like a lot of people of that generation are caught up in this 24 hour news cycle of fear and paranoia perpetuated by some…news stations. And he was fully into that, sitting and watching Fox News all day, every day blaring in his living room…..that doesn’t necessarily lead people to be racist, but it reinforces and galvanizes racist people. And their beliefs.”

Right wing propaganda is about fear. And some people bathe in it for hours a day. So, while the rest of us enjoy walks in the park or a trip to the market, they’re terrified of every swarthy stranger at the Publix or Home Depot.

Add this level of fear to the implicit permission given gun owners by “stand your ground” laws, and you have the elements of an environment of violence.  Vox provides background:

“Some of these shootings took place in states with so-called “stand your ground” laws, which offer expansive legal protections for people who use deadly force against others out of self-defense….and experts have noted that the laws can bolster a “shoot first, ask later” mentality.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Under such laws — which exist in some form in 38 states — people can use lethal force if they reasonably believe their life is under threat, and they don’t have to take steps to retreat or avoid the confrontation first. That’s a stark change from prior laws….In the past, the “castle doctrine,” which has been adopted by most states, allowed people to use deadly force if a person entered their home.

Stand your ground laws take that idea one step further, with some making such allowances no matter where a person is, whether that’s a public place, their vehicle or their office.”

Add pervasive fear and permission to stand your ground to the proliferation of guns in America (aided by the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the Second Amendment) and the US has come undone. From Umair Haque: (emphasis by Haque)

“Did you know that America isn’t just the most violent nation in the industrialized world — but an off the charts extreme outlier? Iceland is the world’s most peaceful society. Canada is the world’s 12th most peaceful society. America is the… 129th.”

That’s 129 out of 163 countries tracked. Further evidence is in the recent TSA statistics about intercepting guns about to be carried on to planes:

“Officers with the Transportation Security Administration confiscated more than 1,500 guns at airport security checkpoints in the US during the first quarter of the year, more than 93% of which were loaded. The 1,508 firearms equate to an average of 16.8 intercepted each day during the first three months of the year…”

The gun gives its owner the power of life and death. No training needed. The power of God right there in your hand. It’s very attractive to a certain type of person. And we cultivate that type of personality in America.

We have no safety nets, no social bonds, no norms of decency. That means we ask each other to bear the unbearable.

We don’t invest enough in safety nets, insurance, public goods, healthcare, education, and, in most states, gun laws. According to Haque, it’s all justified by politicians saying, “I can bear the unbearable — why can’t they?” But we can’t do that forever. Someone will snap, and the frustration of bearing the unbearable pours out as rage that’s visited on whomever is nearest, or easiest to hurt. That’s American Exceptionalism at work. America’s extreme violence, caused in large part by the twisted ideology that asks Americans to bear unbearable things.

Enough about guns and people snapping. It’s time for our Saturday Soother! Here on the Fields of Wrong, our crabapple trees are in bloom. They’re being visited by both birds and bees, each looking for high calorie snacks. The bees for the flowers, the birds for the buds. Our spring clean-up is lagging, so there’s still much to do.

But first, let’s relax for a few minutes. Grab a comfy chair near a big window and watch and listen to Valentina Lisitsa, a Ukrainian-American pianist, play “Rustle of Spring”, a solo piano piece written by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding in 1896:

If you are interested in amazing piano technique, watch Lisitsa perform Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call- April 17, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Woodenshoe Tulip Festival with Mt. Hood in background, WA – April 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

If you drink beer, you know that Bud Lite is terrible. Wrongo shares this opinion with the GOP, but for different reasons.

Wrongo hates the taste. Conservatives hate Bud Light because of a recent Bud Light promotion featuring influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman. Mulvaney posted a sponsored video on her Instagram account announcing that Bud Light had sent her a customized beer can with her face on it.

Bud sent the can to Mulvaney in celebration of the first anniversary of her transition.

Some on the Right are calling the brew a “Woke Mind Virus”. But shouldn’t the real focus be on the MAGA Mind Virus? The Right has created a kind of Bud-lash fever: Some have machine gunned or crushed cases of the beer with heavy equipment. Then a person or persons moved on to making bomb treats at a Bud plant in Van Nuys, CA. Several Budweiser facilities across the nation have also been targeted with bomb threats.

Many on the Right call for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If that sounds ludicrous, it’s because it is. It’s also indicative of where we are in America today.

Trans issues are front and center in the GOP-inspired culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is on display by many on the right, targeting children’s health, sports, drag shows, and health care. It’s seen throughout Conservative media. Anti-trans legislation is growing. And it’s even entering the mainstream. From Vox:

“Mainstream publications like the NY Times increasingly follow the lead of anti-trans agitators, treating what should be understood as a fundamental human rights battle more like a semantic “debate,” fixating on terminology and labels and medical minutiae, instead of humanizing trans and nonbinary people and their experiences.”

Vox reports that this has created a contentious situation at the Times. In February, contributors and members of the Times’s staff posted an open letter protesting the paper’s escalating bias toward anti-trans talking points.

But the Bud-lash fever may be breaking. The Daily Beast reported that on Saturday, the Twitter account for the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) removed a fundraising post that trashed Bud Lite. Apparently, they realized that Anheuser-Busch isn’t some progressive company. In 2022, they gave the NRCC $464,505. The NRCC has decided that they like political donations more than they hate trans people.

Bud’s partnership with Mulvaney also triggered a nearly $5 billion drop in the Anheuser-Busch stock value as of last Wednesday.

On Friday, Anheuser-Busch released a tepid statement from its CEO, Brendan Whitworth, saying he is “responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew”:

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

The company cancelled an event in Missouri last week, citing safety concerns for its employees. Wrongo is against banning TikTok. Here’s a TikTok video of Bud Lite cans being crushed by a steam roller. Where else would we see news like this?

Boycotts are a tradition in America, so like all the others, this one will fade away. The difference with this one is how wound up Conservatives get about something as trivial as a one minute video that pitches Bud Lite.

Time to wake up America! These clowns will try to take you down in a hail of gun fire, saying it’s for God and Freedom, (loosely defined). They just can’t abide sharing the country (or political power) with people who aren’t just like them.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to “All I Ask of You” from the musical “Phantom of the Opera” which had its last Broadway performance yesterday. It opened on Broadway in January of 1988. Since then, Phantom has played almost 14,000 performances (the most in history) to more than 20 million people, grossing over $1.3 billion. An estimated 6,500 people have been employed by the production – including over 400 actors.

Here the song is performed by Michael Ball and Sarah Brightman (the original Christine) at London’s Royal Albert Hall Celebration for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the play:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 16, 2023

America is in a literal death spiral. The more mass shootings take place, the more innocent people die. And then more of America’s Republican politicians tell us that only more guns will solve the problem.

Republicans say that school shootings would be minimized if we would just hire a security guard to cover the door of every school. But with school budgets under pressure, where will the money come from to hire them? And how would the GOP’s plan for out-gunning the next mass shooter turn out?

We need to see mass shooting as a form of domestic terrorism. We’ve moved from having ten Constitutional Amendments that most of us cared deeply about to a place where the Right only really cares about the Second Amendment. Maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised that there are so many Americans who care more about guns than they care about people.

For a certain group, that seems to be what America is all about. If they cared about freedom, nothing would be more of a priority than defending every person’s right to go about their daily lives without the threat of violence. If we really cared about the sanctity of human life, we would prioritize people over guns. On to cartoons.

The unholy trio who prioritize guns over people:

The GOP’s platform is turning into a cliff:

When your anti-human policy list is this long, you must be a Republican:

It isn’t a game:

Clarence is tracking mud into the Court:

Rep. Jim Jordan plans to investigate AG Bragg in NYC:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – April 15, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Wildflowers, Ennis, TX – April 2023 photo by Teresa Gawor

Welcome to the start of taxpayer’s blues weekend. The date for submitting your taxes is April 18 this year, since April 15 falls on a Saturday and Emancipation Day, a holiday observed in Washington, DC, is April 17. Around 88 million Americans still hadn’t filed by April 1, so there’s got to be some burning of the midnight oil this weekend.

Let’s talk about the leak of classified Pentagon documents by Jack Teixeira, a 21 year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira was arrested on Thursday for posting US secret documents in a private Discord chat room he hosted. The classified material was shared with some 20-30 room members, including some of whom were foreigners.

The details are depressing. The group had a taste for racist and anti-Semitic memes. The WaPo reports that they seemed to love guns, military gear and God.

What happens next will be a damage assessment by the US Intelligence Community (IC), along with some of the usual suspects staking out political positions about how inept the IC is by allowing another classified leak.

Sadly, Teixeira has already picked up supporters in the GOP, as this tweet by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) shows:

It’s surprising how open and direct the pro-Putin Right is in linking Russia’s policies to those of the authoritarian white Christian secession movement in America. If you read Wrongo’s column yesterday on what’s dividing America, today’s tweet by Greene is a prime example of the difficulty in finding common cause with the extremist wing of the Republican Party.

Perhaps you didn’t see that Fox’s Tucker Carlson said that Teixeira deserves a medal not prison time. Or that he said that Teixeira is today’s Daniel Ellsberg. Others are saying that the racist meme and the god and guns framing aren’t true and are simply what the liberals at the DOJ and the NYT are spoon feeding to us. If you can stomach it, read some of the comments Right Wingers leave after viewing Tucker’s spew.

If this had happened when GW Bush was president, the GOP would be demanding that Teixeira receive a public execution.

But the GOP has moved on, and now there isn’t a substantial difference between Trump and Teixeira. The crimes are the same, and it seems, so are their motives. But Trump isn’t a 21-year old trying to impress his friends in a private forum. After four years as US president, he knows exactly why his behavior was criminal and dangerous.

And whatever sentence Teixeira receives should also apply to Trump, only with less leniency.

A basic question for the US Intelligence Community is how many more disaffected people are out there who have access to our intelligence? How many have a desire to steal it, either to stick it to the man or to simply hoard a few secrets? How many more IC oddballs are out there living in houses filled with terabytes of digital and paper secrets squirreled away?

That’s enough for today, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we block out all distractions and try to figure out how many miles our cars were driven for business in 2022.

Here on the fields of Wrong, it’s been in the high 80’s and it’s suddenly apparent that there’s plenty of yard work that needs doing. Wrongo has started trimming and shaping the bushes that seemed to grow wildly last year, even without much rain. Ms. Right helpfully says just chain saw them off to half their size. It will be brutal, but effective!

But before starting the yard work, let’s take a few minutes to center ourselves and try to prepare for the week to come.

Start by finding a seat near an open window. Now, watch and listen to the Vienna Philharmonic play Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann: Barcarolle” live and outdoors in Vienna in 2020. Here the orchestra is conducted by Valery Gergiev. Barcarolle comes from the Italian “barca” or boat. It is a traditional folk song sung by Venetian gondoliers, or a piece of music composed in that style:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Can America Come Back From Our Divide?

The Daily Escape:

Easter Sunday, Great Smokey Mountains NP – April 2023 photo by Melissa Russell

We’re back from our roughly 2,200 mile journey to Gettysburg PA, St. Augustine FL, and Charleston SC. The focus of our trip was visiting with family, and it didn’t disappoint. We saw about 40 family members in the three locations. Most are healthy and thriving, and there was lots of laughter.

But we also saw slices of different cultures than what we’re used to here in Connecticut. Wrongo wonders if the US has ever been as divided as it is now?

Yes we’ve been divided in the past, most notably before and during the Civil War. American schools still teach the Civil War to our kids, although like everything else, views on what it was fought about differ largely by geography and political leaning.

Between 1861-1865, we killed our fellow Americans at a prodigious rate, with about 620,000 dying. In fact, Americans killed more other Americans in that war than all of our adversaries did in eight of our wars combined: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Gulf Wars. The Civil War stands alone when it comes to America being divided deeply enough that we killed each other in astonishing numbers.

The Civil War was about one issue: Slavery.

In today’s America, we’re fighting about everything: Gun control, abortion, climate change, fossil fuels, drilling, the environment, immigration, refugees, diversity, voting rights, elections, women’s rights, policing, who gets tax cuts, health care, LGBTQ+ rights, health care for transgender kids, bathrooms, books, what’s taught in classrooms, COVID-19, vaccines, poverty, welfare, unions, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, student debt, Trump, the Jan. 6 insurrection, and education.

These modern divisions exist without exception in every state. They are fought over with words, and occasionally, with weapons. They are fought about in our courts. Some on the political Right call for secession. In 2021, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released the results of a poll that found the majority of the individuals who voted to reelect Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections hoped that their state could secede from the Union.

“Hoping” isn’t doing something to make secession happen, although it’s a first step.

What’s worrisome is that like before the Civil War, there doesn’t seem to be a pathway forward to a common cause. Wrongo has written about “The Cause, The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783” by Joseph Ellis. It says that the founders had to create a blurry vision of the revolution because colonists were suspicious of the motives of other colonies. So the founders described their fight for independence as “The Cause”, an ambiguous term that covered diverse ideas and multiple viewpoints.

It succeeded in unifying us against the British.

Maybe America’s now reached a point where it’s possible that nothing will ever unite us again. Instead, we yell at each other across a chasm of ideological and political partisanship.

Our global reputation has sunk: We’re seen as an undereducated, and unhealthy nation. Many of us want our political opponents dead, while admiring the world’s autocrats. We’re tolerant of the gun slaughter of our children, and callous about the plight of our neighbors, especially if they are poor, sick, or different.

The annual World Happiness Report, based on data from Gallup’s World Poll of 24 developed nations, shows that Americans, when asked to evaluate their current life as a whole, are less content than the citizens of 14 other wealthy countries.

It’s worth noting that most of the countries whose citizens are happier than ours have governments that provide their residents with a sense of safety and security, a foundation on which their people can build a fulfilling life and an optimistic future. They can get treated for medical problems. They can afford life-saving medicine. They don’t fall into medical bankruptcy.

Their life expectancies are longer than ours and rising; America’s is falling.

They value higher education enough to provide it for free. They value families enough that their maternal care, both before and after birth, is outstanding. The US should be ashamed of our maternal mortality rate, which is higher than almost any other country, developed or not, in the world.

We desperately need to find a new “Cause” to bind us together.

Benjamin Franklin famously remarked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that we had formed a republic if we could keep it.

We must get prepared both mentally and in our guts, to fight to keep this country together – AND to keep it a representative democracy.

The alternative looks horrendous.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – April 3, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Just when you thought it was only a meme: The beer is tasty – April 2023 iPhone photo by Wrongo. You may not know that there is a “Florida Man Birthday Challenge” web site. (Hat tip to Amy DeP-O). Wrongo is born in December. Of the many December Florida man entries, Wrongo’s favorite is: “Florida Man says aliens have landed, burns down house stocked with flamethrowers and ammo.”

It was a rental property…

We’ve been here in the land of the anti-woke for a few days. No one in our family openly talks politics, so  we just enjoy the fabulous food. But you’re aware that Trump was indicted by the NYC DA. You have probably heard that Trump said:

“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was handpicked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace.”

That led to some research. But it’s no secret. The NYT reported that Soros has put money behind electing reform-minded prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg. But he doesn’t fund them directly. His foundation donates to organizations that do field work like Color for Change. This isn’t any different from the right-wing billionaires who support right-wing organizations, issues and candidates.

So, when critics of Alvin Bragg say that he is backed by Soros, it should be similar to when critics say Republican politicians are backed by the Koch Brothers or the late Sheldon Adelson.

But bringing up George Soros feels different. The reason for vilifying Soros is rarely spelled out. You get general descriptors, like he’s a “globalist.” Of course, Soros IS Jewish, and the charge that rich Jews try to control the world for their own mysterious and nefarious reasons is an old and dangerous trope on the right. But Sheldon Adelson, who backed many Right-wing Republicans, including Trump was also Jewish.

Some say that people who mention Soros are anti-Semitic, and some probably are. Yes, he’s indirectly funded Bragg, but is Bragg doing something that wouldn’t have happened anyway? How exactly is Soros pulling Bragg’s strings? And why is Soros in more control of politicians he donates to than are donors on the right?

There’s zero indication that Bragg is bucking popular opinion to do the bidding of a Jewish billionaire, which is something you can’t say about many, many NRA-backed politicians.

The thing that impresses Wrongo the most is that while George Soros isn’t small potatoes on the billionaire list, the right-wing thinks he’s able to pay off millions of people, start revolutions, and influence deep states in dozens of countries without going broke.

Virtually every Republican politician has stood up for Trump, saying he’s the victim of a political witch hunt. Ron Brownstein lays out the Republican’s dilemma:

“The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the…presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.”

It’s going to get worse for the GOP, since it’s highly likely that this is only the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. There are possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia’s District Attorney Fani Willis. She has been examining Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in her state. There are also the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his role in the Jan. 6 effort to block Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election.

So, while Trump may lock up the primaries without difficulty, the recent NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey shows that 61% of Americans—including 64% of independents and 70% of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again.

That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60% of Americans do not support Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

The challenge for the GOP is that about 80% of Republicans said they consider themselves part of the MAGA movement, and about 75% say they want him back in the White House. That means he will be the nominee, but not the next president.

Brownstein quotes Bryan Bennett, director of polling and analytics for the Democratic polling consortium that conducts the Navigator surveys:

“For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters….seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”

Time to wake up America! There’s nothing to be gained by letting the media, the GOP or Trump spin you up with irrelevant issues. Soros is just another wealthy white guy who wants to see change he can believe in.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Larkin Poe cover a Son House tune, “Preaching Blues”. Eddie House was a troubled man. He grappled for years with the seeming incompatibility between his growing love of the blues and his teenage desire to be a Baptist preacher:

Sample Lyric:

I’m gonna get me some religion
I’m gonna join the Baptist church
I’m gonna get me some religion
I’m gonna join the Baptist church
Gonna be a preacher
So I don’t have to work

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – March 27, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Snow Geese flying over Daffodil fields with Mt. Baker in background, WA – March 2023 photo by Erwin Buske Photography

Three House Republican committee chairs are indicating that the House may soon take up legislation to strip state and local prosecutors of the authority to prosecute former presidents. They’re saying that America needs federal legislation to prevent Trump from being indicted by a state.

Is the bill going to be called the “Ex-Presidents Are Above the Law” Act? Surely they mean to draft legislation to protect only Republican presidents and not the Democratic ones.

There are a least two states that have Trump in their sights. Georgia for attempted election fraud, and New York for falsifying business records to hide the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. In addition, there are civil suits in NY over his business practices and a defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape by the writer E Jean Carroll.

You may have heard that these same Congress critters sent a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg requiring Bragg’s appearance in front of their committees to give evidence about the NY DA’s ongoing investigation into Trump. When Bragg said of their demand:

“It is not appropriate for Congress to interfere with pending local investigations,….This unprecedented inquiry by federal elected officials into an ongoing matter serves only to hinder, disrupt and undermine the legitimate work of our dedicated prosecutors.”

The trio followed up with another letter to Bragg rejecting his arguments. They wrote:

“Your conclusory claim that our constitutional oversight responsibilities will interfere with law enforcement is misplaced and unconvincing.”

Because: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“the potential criminal indictment of a former President of the United States by an elected local prosecutor of the opposing political party (and who will face the prospect of re-election) implicates substantial federal interests”.

They meant the former president is facing re-election, not Bragg. They added:

“Therefore, the Committee on the Judiciary, as a part of its broad authority to develop criminal justice legislation, must now consider whether to draft legislation that would, if enacted, insulate current and former presidents from such improper state and local prosecutions…”

We all know that this is more performative grandstanding by House Republicans. Since the Senate has a Democratic majority and the White House is held by Biden, a bill shielding ex-presidents from prosecution will not be enacted into law. But the Republicans persist. On Sunday, Rep. James Comer (R- KY), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, insisted to CNN’s Jake Tapper that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is improperly conducting a federal investigation. From Aaron Rupar:

Comer has a BS in Agriculture, BTW. He soldiered on:

“We just want the government out of our elections….We believe the local DAs need to be focused on business crimes, on burglary, on theft …”

You have to be a moron to say you want the government out of our elections. States are in charge of their elections even in Comer’s Kentucky. And Trump wasn’t president when he allegedly orchestrated the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels and then fraudulently altered his books to hide it.

Time to wake up America! There is no longer any reason to look for traditional Republicans inside of the GOP. And anyone who is attempting to strip state and local prosecutors of the authority needed to do their jobs just to protect their Party’s cult leader, well, that sounds like Fascism.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Pink Martini play “ÂżDĂłnde estĂĄs, Yolanda?” live from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon on New Year’s Eve 2,005.

It is a fan favorite from their debut album, “Sympathique”, featuring vocalist China Forbes, and including Thomas Lauderdale on the piano, Gavin Bondy on trumpet, and featuring a trombone solo by Robert Taylor:

Where is Yolanda, and indeed, where are the traditional Republicans?

(This song is for friend of the blog Ashley G. who has some health issues and loves Pink Martini)

Facebooklinkedinrss